* 2008-05-25 John Spikowski announces to close panotools.info on the quicktime-vr mailing list and on [http://www.panoguide.com/forums/commercial/4915/ panoguide] "Due to the lack of participation on the forum / mailing list and the loss of sponsors."

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* 2008-05-29 panotools.info seems to be no longer available.

[[Category:Community]]

[[Category:Community]]

Revision as of 11:23, 30 May 2008

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This document is intended to summarize the events that lead to the creation of the PanoToolsNG Yahoo Group and the move away from PanoTools.info.

Contents

Short history

The first PanoTools mailinglist "proj-imim" was created by Helmut Dersch and was hosted at the fh-furtwangen. After a patent threat from Ipix the list was shut down around 2003-04-17 and the community decided to move to the PanoTools Yahoo Group created by John Spikowski. John Spikowski managed the list and refused the help of other list members because he didn't trust them: [1]

First attempts to move to panotools.info

2005 03-15 John Spikowski tried to migrate the list to mailman [5] claiming that his work is worth 50.000$ and coining the infamous The bottom line is that being a PanoTools members is no longer going to be a free ride. [6]

2005-03-18 After this events Kevin Kratzke joined John Spikowski as list mom [7]

2006-06-01 John Spikowski starts to "Mirror" the Yahoo group [12] with a fork in mind

2006-06-04 Steven Dowd found out that John Spikowski is using the server for other projects including his commercial pages [13]

2006-06-06 John Spikowski, Yuval Levy and Bert Vierstra are blocked from posting for a month [14] but John Spikowski was still able to post to the list [15]

2006-06-09 John Spikowski announced the PTML list [16] to fork the list as explained in [17]

2006-06-26 John Spikowski announced to sell the panotools.info domain [18]

Changing the management

A poll was set up where 93% voted to change the management of the PanoTools list so as a first step where new moderators added
[19], [20] and Kevin Kratzke signaled that he would give the ownership of the list to a formal entity like the IVRPA or a non-profit organisation as a Verein. John Spikowski didn't like that idea.

2006-07-10 John Spikowski regained ownership through a back door, removed all moderators including Kevin Kratzke and changed the list to moderated [21]

Unreliability

Since then John Spikowski has acted in a very unreliable manner. One day he offers peace:
[23] the next he spreads wild accusations, mostly on his site, the next he removes the accusations again (hence no link). On http://www.panotools.org/debunk there is a list of answers to his most frequent accusations.

External incidents

After the move of the community to the NG list John Spikowski also tried to disturb the list at Nabble where he tried to delete the list several times or changed the description [24] and on Wikipedia where he modified the PanoTools article several times [25] and attacked other people for which he got several admin warnings and blocks
[26],
[27],
[28]

Some days before 2006-09-28 he started to copy articles from this wiki thereby deleting the history, which is a clear violation of the authors copyright and of the GFDL (Paragraph 4.I.) under which the wiki articles where released.

Attempted Blackmail

Starting about middle of August 2007 John Spikowski attempted to
blackmail several PanotoolsNG members and admins by registering
domains with their names (or products). He pointed those domains to
his own pages where he tried to defame the respective persons by
describing them as being "a thief who steals assets and resources of
other web sites", or an "internet terrorist" who "steals others
identities", "posts lies and propaganda" and "slanders people who
don't agree with his warped sense of reality".

He tried to make these targets of his vendetta look silly by
depicting them as a clown or falsely stating that thier products violate copyright
and carry viruses and spyware.

His main goal appeared to be an attempt to hide the history of his
constant accusations and rants against PanotoolsNG members and admins.

Prior to posting the defaming pages he sent his targets / victims
demands for the deletion of this (history) page and the
[29] debunk page. He also gave a warning that failure to
comply with these demands would result in the defamatory pages going
on-line and also all links in his so called "archive" would be changed to point to that defamatory pages. He tried to threaten the respective members with sentences like "I promise you the damage to your reputation and the products you sell will cost you more then all the time you invested in NG to date." and "I will continue to come up with ways to make this as painful as possible..."

The Moderators respect the rights of the individual targets / victims
to choose their own response but as a group refuse to negotiate with terrorists or
blackmailers.

Proof is available on request and will be disclosed if
requested by a legal process.

panotools.info closed

2008-05-25 John Spikowski announces to close panotools.info on the quicktime-vr mailing list and on panoguide "Due to the lack of participation on the forum / mailing list and the loss of sponsors."